What are Web Pages?

In the Chapter 30 I explained that the World Wide Web is comprised of several billion individual web pages. These pages are literally the same as the pages you create in your word processor—in fact, many of them are created in word processors, and the code for any web page can be viewed in a word processor.

The big deal about web pages is that they have “hypertext links”—text you click on to make another page appear in front of you. It’s like this: Imagine that you could open a book to its table of contents and touch, say, “Chapter 3,” and the book instantly flips to Chapter 3. In Chapter 3, there is a reference to Greek mythology. You touch the word “Greek mythology,” and a book about Greek mythology instantly appears in front of you, open to the page you want. As you’re reading about Greek mythology, you see a reference to goddess worship so you touch that reference and instantly that book appears in front of you, open to the page you want. That’s what web pages do, that’s what hypertext is. That is incredible.